Memories are made of this

I used to make, and sell, the world's most expensive ice cream. I was about 15 at the time, and taught myself to make ice cream from the superb Constance Spry Cookery Book. She has a brilliant method for vanilla ice cream which involves trickling boiling hot sugar syrup onto egg yolks while whisking furiously - a dangerous enough activity to excite any young teenager, I would have thought.

That summer holiday I was so obsessed that I persuaded my mother to buy one of those ice cream-making machines where you put the bowl bit in the freezer for several hours, then put it in the plastic bowl so a paddle fixed to the lid churns it while it freezes. Old hat, these days, but a pretty state-of-the-art gadget at the time. In fact the clips on the lid broke the first time I used it, and I had to tape the lid down for each churn with about half a roll of Sellotape - a procedure I followed every time I made ice cream for the next five years. I found the machine not long ago lurking deep in a cupboard in my mother's pantry, the white plastic almost black with gummy Sellotape scars.

My greatest success was fudge ice cream. I'd make a batch of vanilla fudge that had appeared on the label of a condensed milk tin, and which my mother had stuck in the section of blank pages headed'Additional Recipes' at the back of Constance Spry. To this day it is the best fudge I have ever eaten despite - or perhaps because of - the fact that it never actually sets properly, so you practically have to eat it with a spoon. The only time it ever sets firm, in fact, is when little pieces of it are stirred into ice cream, at which point it achieves a kind of heavenly perfection.

My mother sometimes served my fudge ice cream at her dinner parties, and one of the guests was so impressed she called me the next day - not just to congratulate me, but with a business proposition. She would pay me to keep her supplied with my vanilla fudge ice cream throughout the summer. We negotiated a price of £2 an hour for my labour, plus the costs of the ingredients. Not bad for 1981. Thatcher and Tebbit would have been proud.

My ice cream ended up costing my mum's friend a staggering £11 a litre. I certainly charged for the time it took me to bike to the village shop two miles away to buy all the ingredients - and for the half hour or so that I spent watching the machine going round and round. But I thought charging for the time the bowl of the machine spent in the freezer between batches, while I went and smoked in the woods with my friends, would be pushing my luck. Anyway, she'd swing by in her Mercedes to pick up the latest batch, and handed over the cash without flinching. The cigs were on me that summer.

It all came flooding back to me last week, when I paid my first visit to Balham Hill Farm, a great new little farm shop that's just opened over the border in Somerset. As well as their own lovely lamb and beef and locally produced veg they had a freezer, and in it a range of ice creams from a Devon producer called Rookebeare which I hadn't tried before. And there it was: Vanilla Fudge Ice Cream. Not Double Praline Fudge Brownie Dynamite. Not Vanilla and White Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Explosion. Just Vanilla. Fudge. Ice cream.

I bought a tub, and immediately ripped off the lid. I was taken aback by how much it looked like my ice cream of two decades ago. The pale but deep cream colour. The size and distribution of the fudge pieces. But it was tasting it that really blew my mind. This was my ice cream. The rich raw milk taste and silky, yolky texture of the frozen custard. The chilly graininess of the fudge. Taste memory is the most poignant, and perhaps the most accurate too. It all came flooding back in a delightful, sensual wave of oral nostalgia.

I've been through a few tubs since, and they have met with universal approval. You can find out where to buy the ice cream by calling their office on 01363 866424 or sending an email to info@rookbearefarm.co.uk. Or you can attempt to make your own, by following my recipe. In either case you'd be doing yourself a massive hedonistic favour.

Lightly grease a tin. Put the fresh milk, butter and sugar into a heavy based saucepan over a low heat and stir until the sugar has dissolved. Add the syrup and condensed milk and bring slowly to the boil, then simmer gently, stirring continuously, for about 35 minutes.

To test for the setting point, drop a little of the mixture into cold water. If it will press into a soft ball, the fudge is ready (this is meant to happen at 125°C/240°F). Remove from the heat and leave to cool for five minutes, then add vanilla essence, and beat with a wooden spoon until thick and grained in appearance. Pour into the prepared tin and leave until partially set. Mark into one-inch squares with a sharp knife. When it's cold, cut the fudge into squares. Do let me know if yours actually does set!

Dissolve the sugar in the water and boil hard for a few minutes to get a light syrup that forms a thread (110°C/ 225°F). Vigorously whisk the egg yolks in a bowl, and trickle on the hot syrup as you do so. Keep whisking until you have a pale, light, moussey mixture. Lightly whip the cream and fold this in, along with the vanilla essence.

This is a 'parfait' style of ice cream which can be frozen without further whisking. Or you can pour it into an ice cream making machine, and churn as usual.

Vanilla fudge ice cream

Make a batch of fudge and a batch of ice cream. Cut about 150g of the fudge into little pieces. When the ice cream has finished churning, but is still soft, stir in the fudge pieces. Or, for the parfait version, remove the ice cream from the freezer when half frozen, and stir in the fudge pieces.

About this article

Memories are made of this

This article appeared in the Observer
on Saturday 12 April 2003.
It was published on
the Guardian website
at 11.33 EDT on Sunday 13 April 2003.
It was last modified at 11.33 EST on Thursday 3 November 2005.
It was first published at 11.33 EST on Thursday 3 November 2005.